(Hawks’ Hill), a dreary and lonely spot, far from friends and even neighbors.  They remained here six years, during which time Carlyle wrote many of his best essays, and Sartor Resartus, his most original work.  The latter went begging among publishers for two years, and was finally published serially in Fraser’s Magazine, in 1833-1834.  By this time Carlyle had begun to attract attention as a writer, and, thinking that one who made his living by the magazines should be in close touch with the editors, took his wife’s advice and moved to London “to seek work and bread.”  He settled in Cheyne Row, Chelsea,—­a place made famous by More, Erasmus, Bolingbroke, Smollett, Leigh Hunt, and many lesser lights of literature,—­and began to enjoy the first real peace he had known since childhood.  In 1837 appeared The French Revolution, which first made Carlyle famous; and in the same year, led by the necessity of earning money, he began the series of lectures—­German.  Literature (1837), Periods of European Culture (1838), Revolutions of Modern Europe (1839), Heroes and Hero Worship (1841)—­which created a sensation in London.  “It was,” says Leigh Hunt, “as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalized by German philosophy and his own intense reflection and experience.”

Though Carlyle set himself against the spirit of his age, calling the famous Reform Bill a “progress into darkness,” and democracy “the rule of the worst rather than the best,” his rough sincerity was unquestioned, and his remarks were more quoted than those of any other living man.  He was supported, moreover, by a rare circle of friends,—­Edward Irving, Southey, Sterling, Landor, Leigh Hunt, Dickens, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, and, most helpful of all, Emerson, who had visited Carlyle at Craigenputtoch in 1833.  It was due largely to Emerson’s influence that Carlyle’s works were better appreciated, and brought better financial rewards, in America than in England.

Carlyle’s fame reached its climax in the monumental History of Frederick the Great (1858-1865), published after thirteen years of solitary toil, which, in his own words, “made entire devastation of home life and happiness.”  The proudest moment of his life was when he was elected to succeed Gladstone as lord rector of Edinburgh University, in 1865, the year in which Frederick the Great was finished.  In the midst of his triumph, and while he was in Scotland to deliver his inaugural address, his happiness was suddenly destroyed by the death of his wife,—­a terrible blow, from which he never recovered.  He lived on for fifteen years, shorn of his strength and interest in life; and his closing hours were like the dull sunset of a November day.  Only as we remember his grief and remorse at the death of the companion who had shared his toil but not his triumph, can we understand the sorrow that pervades the pages of his Reminiscences.  He died in 1881, and at his own wish was buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but among his humble kinsfolk in Ecclefechan.  However much we may differ from his philosophy or regret the harshness of his minor works, we shall probably all agree in this sentiment from one of his own letters,—­that the object of all his struggle and writing was “that men should find out and believe the truth, and match their lives to it.”